Did ticket bots inflate Garth Brooks sales?

Ticket sales for Garth Brooks’ series of concerts in Spokane set records. Before tickets went on sale, TicketsWest was working to make sure none of those tickets went to automated programs called ticket bots.

Author:
Staff , KREM

Published:
4:25 PM PDT October 18, 2017

Updated:
4:27 PM PDT October 18, 2017

SPOKANE, Wash. – Ticket sales for Garth Brooks’ series of concerts in Spokane set records. Before tickets went on sale, TicketsWest was working to make sure none of those tickets went to automated programs called ticket bots. Right now, there are hundreds of Garth Brooks tickets available on secondary markets for greatly inflated prices.

The TicketsWest president, Dusty Kurtz, explained how the company prevented ticket bots from getting access to tickets, “for every concert we put on sale, or every event that we have on our website we use a company called Distil Networks.”

Kurtz explained Distil Networks is one of the major companies in the United States working with companies to evaluate traffic that’s coming into websites. The company can evaluate browsing behavior, the speed at which someone is browsing, and ultimately determine if the behavior is caused by an actual person or by an automatic ticket bot.

Kurtz said there were no active ticket bots during the sale of tickets for the Garth Brooks concerts in Spokane, “all of that traffic was truly Garth Brooks fans trying to get tickets.”

Kurtz said it is possible that people who were not ticket bots still bought tickets to jack up prices and resell them on other sites, “I mean they’re not acting as a bot, but the goal is the same in trying to secure tickets. There is no legislation preventing that, but what we’re trying to do is prevent large scale abuse of it.”